China, in the rapid process of its urbanization, is pressing on with making up a missed lesson "crisis management" after it has been embarrassed several times by natural or man-made disasters due to lack of city emergency mechanisms over recent years.

According to Chinese mayors who attended a "World Mayors Forum" in Beijing last Friday, they are more and more concerned about disaster prevention and crisis management in cities.

"China is one of the countries that suffer the most severe natural disasters in the world. Besides, the modernization and expansion of cities may easily trigger catastrophic crises," said Chen Zhifeng, vice mayor of north China's port city, Tianjin Municipality.

"It is imperative that crisis management systems for preventing disasters should be established in Chinese cities," he said.

Official statistics show that from 1990 to 2002, China's urbanization level has risen from 18.96 percent to 39.1 percent, thus entering a "speed-up" phase. However, in this rapid process, more risks are hidden. Cities are facing potential crises such as natural disasters, accidents, or pubic health emergencies.

In 2001 winter, Beijing was hit by a moderate snow, which almost paralyzed the traffic of the Chinese capital: many citizens, workers and students reluctantly stepped out of buses to walk for hours into midnight for their homes after shopping, work or school; many private car drivers were forced to stay inside on their way home due to slippery road and severe traffic jam.

Similar thing happened again to Beijing three years later. This time, it was a strong thunderstorm in 2004 summer that left several citizens killed.

Chinese citizens, or even the whole world, may never forget about the deadly SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic in 2003 that left many Chinese cities confronted with an unprecedented crisis of public health.

"A city is an organized society with high efficiency, but it is also a very fragile social system, so it may be disabled if there is something wrong with a certain tache," said Xu Xianping, vice governor of central China's Hunan Province.

In recent years, several big crises that happened in foreign cities sounded the alarm for Chinese cities, such as the Sept. 11 attack in New York and the tsunami that heavily struck many cities in Asia and southeast Asia on December 26 last year.

After going through one disaster after another and suffering heavy losses, the Chinese government decided to set up emergency mechanisms and work out emergency plans in an effort to secure the life and property of the public as well a normal social order, a lesson that China is in dire need of making up for.

In July 2003, the central government proposed to establish an emergency mechanism and so far, emergency plans have been completed on the whole. They included an overall national emergency plan, 25 special emergency plans and 80 such plans relating to respective government departments. At provincial levelor below, many provinces and cities have also drawn up their emergency plans.

Analyst said that China has initially set up a crisis management system of its own and it seems that the emergency plans have begun to play certain role, as demonstrated in the relief work in the present flood that is affecting part of Hunan. According to statistics, among the 440,000 population of victims, more than 100,000 have been evacuated in safety.

Zhao Gongqing, vice mayor of southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, cited another successful example at the forum as saying that the local government, in handling an accident of chlorine leak at the end of last year, started its emergency plans to disperse over 30,000 citizens, which not only minimized the losses but also secured a normal order of society.

In building China's crisis management system, concerns about humans are much more highlighted.

"In Chongqing, we pay much attention to the public's right of being informed in handling crisis. That promotes government's transparency and wins trust of the public," Zao said.

"Meanwhile, that improves the public's ability to respond to emergencies and helps mobilize the public to participate more in the salvage work," he said.

To any country, it will be a long-term, complicated and tough task to establish and perfect its crisis responsive system, China is no exception. In addition, China has a lot to learn from the advanced countries that have set up relatively mature crisis management systems. France, for instance, clearly defines the step of salvaging in emergency plans and also stipulates emergency system in the Constitution so as to ensure that the government can effectively execute its administrative power in emergency state.

"So we need share experiences with each other to deal with crisis, surmount disasters, thus promoting an overall, coordinated and sustainable development of the entire human kind,"

(Xinhua News Agency June 14, 2005)